Silversprite

After an excessively and stupidly late night drinking with Mark, Tyrone and Oscar on the train out of Chicago, I woke up to the coach attendant banging on my roomette door as we were early at our destination. It was 5:20am. “Leave me alone; I’m British!” “Sir, you gonna need to get your shit together; we pullin into the station real soon.” After the world’s quickest shower and a bag pack where more by luck nothing was left behind, I staggered off the train into the darkness of a pre-dawn Memphis.

I felt like crap. Several days with little sleep, too much drink the night before, and an awesome five days in Chicago had done me in. The lack-of-sleep aching in my arms and neck had gotten real bad and my heart felt like it was attempting to escape from my rib cage.

Luckily, there was a perfect diner, apparently the oldest restaurant still going in Memphis, across the road. And it was just opening. I went in, trailing clothes and luggage everywhere (only on the way out did I discover one of my socks jamming the door open). Holly appeared, and in the most southern, Tennessee accent possible read my mind (or saw my general demeaner), fixed me with eyes as blue as the Mississippi I’d see a little later and said “Yew wan lotsa ca-ffee, sur?”.

Best to just say that my answer was in the positive. A startled Holly brought over a pot of coffee which I started to work through, while wondering (after Brooke in Montana) if every waitress in the USA had blue eyes. In an hour I drank enough to give an elephant the shakes. I ate a huge, spinach and mushroom filled omelette and drank more coffee. A trip to the restroom and I filled up with coffee again.

I packed better, went outside, collected socks and spotted trolley cars, similar to those in San Francisco. Got on; the conductor / driver informed that the cars do a large loop taking in downtown and the bank of the Mississippi. Perfect.

As the car slowly trundled around, extremely well dressed people, mainly 50+, got on and off. Turned out there was a church conference going on in downtown Memphis, and people were converging on it. In three laps of the loop I had a good chat to several groups, and was invited to their gospel service that evening. Which was kinda tempting.

Three laps of the loop later I’d worked out a plan for the day. First, breakfast number two; fried chicken, corn and soda while sitting on the banks of the Mississippi, watching the boats chug by. The food was real good, and sitting there was as relaxing as it could get.

But my ticket for Graceland was for the 11am tour. I got my shit together, found a taxi, dumped (literally) my luggage off at the hotel, and continued on to Elvis’s crib. Where a surreal few hours was spent wandering around his house, cars and airplane.

I tried to ring Scotland. There’s many things I love about America, but one thing I really hate is attempting to make an international phone call from there. An impossibly complex and contradictory set of labels on ehe phone implied that 50 cents would get me “Up to 5 minutes” for a call to the UK, if I followed the instructions. E.T. probably had an easier time phoning home than I did phoning Scotland. The call turned out to be a lot less than 5 minutes, and costed a lot more than 50c. Convinced this is a conspiracy by cellphone customers to get more people signed up, I returned to Memphis.

Much of the afternoon was spent chilling on the bank of the Mississippi.

Everyone who passed me (many joggers, a few cyclists, the odd policeman) said hello. After a while, and aware it was my only full day in Memphis, a wander around some of the streets was in order. Beale street is the main drag, with a combination of blues bars, cafes, Irish pubs (some more genuine than others), seafood and southern food. I ate ribs in one place that had the irresistable slogan ‘Put some South in your Mouth’, then wandered, looking for somewhere that sold Obama t-shirts, and ended up in a blues bar. And it was good; the band played, beer of some kind arrived, and I chilled out. Annoyingly, it was dark in there, my camera battery had given out and I couldn’t find a recharger in the gloom.

I left the bar feeling sated but even more wrecked. A taxi was waiting outside. I got in the back and possibly rudely demanded to be taken to my hotel. Turned out it wasn’t a taxi, but a Memphis police car which has similar markings to one of the taxi companies. Words were said between the policeman and me (we won’t be exchanging Christmas cards). I got out, as it was preferable to a night in a communal cell, and found a legitimate taxi.

I got back to the hotel with the intention of doing lots of admin things, repacking, organising, whatever. But was too out of it so literally crawled into bed with my laptop, gave up checking emails or doing Flickr stuff, had a twitter conversation about digital library researchers with an imsomniac in London and fell asleep.

The next morning I felt sharp and truly awake for the first in a long time. Hit the shower (Mmmm, hotel shower, nicer than Amtrak train shower) singing Ash’s “Shining Light” loud enough to wake most of the hotel. Getting said hotel to get a taxi to the train station was problematic. “It’ll be here in 10 minutes”. It wasn’t. “Here in 5.” It wasn’t. “It’s just pulling up now, sir.” “How? Why are you sayin this? We can both see out there for miles. There’s no traffic! Is this an invisible taxi, pulling up?”

I gave up on the hotel and got my own taxi. Got to Memphis station just as the sun was rising, and the smokers from Chicago were outside puffing away. Here I met Dwayne and Martin and took their picture with the sun rising over Memphis behind:

Dwayne, on the left, had an interesting story. He was heading back to New Orleans, where we used to live, earning a living as a landscaper. Hurricane Katrina came along and destroyed his house and the neighbourhood. He had a pretty graphic account of the days after the hurricane; people shooting over a bag of ice; the neighbourhood he lived in literally floating away; people disappearing when the alligators came; the breakdown of law, order and society.

Dwayne and Martin both speculated on whether the hurricane had caused all of the damage, and the levee that seemed to have exploded inward; they both noted (and I’d heard this from others down from Chicago) that more than a few people wanted extreme “solutions” to New Orleans “issues”, with Katrina coming at an opportune time.

Three years on and Dwayne still hadn’t gotten his FEMA compensation, and was only now starting to seriously plan on returning. He seemed like a decent, hardworking kinda guy who just wanted to get by and raise his family well.

“Git your asses on board, sirs”, so we did. The train trundled through the Mississippi countryside and for a while it bizarrely reminded me of … Worcestershire, with little copses of trees, ordered fields, small houses and tractors. But then the countryside changed to something very un-Worcestershire like, with cotton fields and swampy woods. The trees were still the star attraction, leaf turning bronze and red in the fall weather.

The nearly nine hours to New Orleans was spent doing admin, processing pictures, looking at the countryside of Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana go past, and inevitably talking to people. One group of four people were off to New Orleans to jump on a cruise ship for a friends wedding in Caribbean waters. The teccie of the group, who not surprisingly took an interest in Samantha, told me he hated weddings and usually avoided them. But in this case, on a cruise ship with unlimited drink and many bridesmaids, he was reckoning on a good chance of being laid. I wished him luck and suitable precautions.

A chef from a New Orleans restaurant sat at my table and we ended up chatting for several hours. He was pretty useful in marking out where to go, where not to go, which taxi companies were legit (few) and which were not (many), and where to eat and drink. I now know what a tap rat, and several other things, are. After a while, the cottonfields gave way to different trees, and smaller shacks, often on stilts. The trees changed, to more tropical varieties, and the swamps increased in volume and number. The land flattened out; parts of Louisiana reminded me of Norfolk, just with hotter sun and alligators in the water.

The last hour in to New Orleans was spent looking for the bitey creatures (my count: just one lazy one). Then, we slowly came in, through inhabited suburbs of lo-rise detached houses.

So this is the Big Easy. I get the feeling this is going to be fun…

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